Buffalo Proposes Stiffer Regulations On Food Trucks

Food trucks - as those mobile restaurants-on-wheels are called are the "in" thing. Perhaps that's why brick-and-mortar restaurant owners in Buffalo, New York are proposing stricter regulations on them.

Food truck operators believe mobile vending regulations proposed by a group of restaurant owners are "protectionist" and include issues never discussed during last month's talks between parties on both sides of the debate.

Proposed rules for the operation of food trucks in the city made by Entrepreneurs for a Better Buffalo are "a thinly veiled, misguided effort to protect the 'brick and mortar' businesses," an attorney for the Western New York Food Truck Association said in a letter to the Common Council.

In effect, the non-mobile restauranteurs are seeking to limit where the food trucks can operate.

The restaurant group's proposal would limit food trucks to publicly owned parking lots in the districts, which it says includes side streets off Elmwood stretching toward both Richmond Avenue and Delaware Avenue.

The restaurant group's proposal "constitutes a barely concealed protectionist effort to substantially restrict the operation of food trucks on two of the busier avenues -- and their surrounding neighborhoods -- within the City of Buffalo," Stenger wrote